What is to be learned from a nightmare? Perhaps they tell us what we fear. If this is so, what ought one make of this nightmare? I am in a classroom, a huge lecture hall. It is brightly lit, and it is filled with students, not hundreds, more like one or two thousand students. The students are all talking to each other energetically. It is normal conversation, but it is pervasive. They are making arrangements to study together. They are talking about sports. They are doing social things. Really, I have no idea what they are talking about. Except that none of it seems to deal with any subject matter. At some point a person comes in and scrawls something incomprehensible on the board. It is not graffiti. But it has no connection to any conceivable course of study. The person and his writing is ignored. The words, if they are words, make no sense in any imaginable context.The students linger in this state of disorder for some time. Then, the crowd begins to disperse.
I realize that this class meeting is over. I don't know who the professor is. I don't know when the class meets again. I don't know what the texts are. I don't know what the cirriculum is, so I would have no hope of discovering the texts or boning up on subject matter. I don't know anyone in the class. I imagine I am registered for the course. I imagine there will be tests I imagine I will fail. I presume that professor, text, syllabus, meeting time, all this stuff is vital to my own success in this course. And I don't understand why other students would not think so, too. Yet all of them seem completely undisturbed by this class meeting. It is as if this is precisely like all the classes they have ever been in. It is as if this ought to be the way the classes work.
At one level this is just another "fear of failure" sort of dream. I am in a situation and there is no hope, no chance of success. This point of view may be helpful to me, but I know it will be unhelpful to the two or three people who sometimes read my pieces.
At another level, this dream is about fear of a total absence of leadership in authority positions. I write here quite frequently about how the last time government had a tendency to engage with real world problems was during the Carter administration. And that the press interpreted Carter's election loss as a sign that the American people wanted the government to stop dealing with problems that affected their lives. So it did.
My own sense is that when it comes to many of the really big problems that threaten the futures of ordinary Americans, government simply doesn't show up. Why? because the issues are threatening, painful. A candidate loses votes by talking about problems before they have become life-threatening crises. Boosterism, however, always sells.Rallying people together is a vital part of good governance, but not to the exclusion of talking about pressing issues.
There is a dark side to this dream as a metaphor for government. It suggests that I am looking for some authority figure to show up and give me the answers to the questions on the examination. I see the instructor as being a kind of instrument of my success. And I see the the instructor as a kind of ultimate authority figure.
If I believed that that educators really ought to be little dictators of their own tiny domains the dream would suggest my fear of a kind of free-for-all in the classroom that undercut the success of education. But while I agree that educators need firm control over classroom processes, I believe that if education is to be successful it is not because teachers teach; it is because students learn. There is a big difference between these two.
When I think about government, I wand essentially the same thing. I want my government authorities to create the conditions for a fair and productive society. I want them to keep order and provoke the best behavior and best thought. But without being the least bit dictatorial.
I want them to listen to me. I do not want them telling me how it is going to be; rather, I want them to be asking me the right questions. If I provide the answers they expect, policy develops as they imagined it; but if my answers are both sufficiently persuasive and suggestive of a better policy, it develops differently. Policy develops like a well run conversation, where people with different backgrounds, aptitudes, capacities, and perspectives, lead the discussion to a conclusion that could not have been reached by any single person involved.
Or it can be compared to the relationship between a horse, a carriage, and its driver. Government is the horse. It pulls the carriage. But the driver directs the horse over the course of the ride. This is the proper metaphor for democracy, but if the carriage is not to spend most of its time mired in a ditch, it requires both a sober, knowledgable driver and a well-trained horse.
At a third level, I think it is possible that the fear is about education itself. Education fails in two ways. In one way it fails to deliver what it is rightly designed to do. In another way it fails by lack of proper design.
It's a big ball of yarn, so let's start with the evaluation process. The evaluation process ought to play several critical roles. It is responsible for sorting students according to their strengths and weaknesses. It is responsible for motivating students to study and learn. And it is necessary to assess the effectiveness of the learning process itself.
The current structure of quizzes and tests with close temporal connection to the act of study does promote some kind of diligence. Yet it does so at the expense of deeper learning. It is one thing to memorize facts for a test or quiz. It is another entirely to internalize information and use it to inform decision-making.
As importance as diligence is in society, there are other means of teaching it; and education is too precious to make diligence the singular end of the training. We need to learn assessment methods that promote deeper learning and learning that lasts beyond the next test or quiz. We have to put an end to the question of "is this going to be on the final?" Not just the question itself, but the thinking from which it arises. It ought to be an unthinkable question.
As a student, I moved from a British system to an American one. In the British system one did get report cards six times a year, but they were qualitative, not quantitative. They told one more about how one could do better and less about how good or bad one really was. And at the end of the day, that process is more consistent with all the noble goals of education than is a grade.
There was one week of testing at the end of the year. And this week of testing established what a person had learned. It was a hellish week, even for a second-grader. But it is impossible to cram for a year's worth of studies. Tests measured less what was thrown at the wall than what was incorporated into it. As a student in America, I liked never having to remember more than six week's worth of material. But I think such a system tempted students to learn to forget.
I believe one might find a deep psychological connection between our educational forgetfulness and our political neglectfulness. They arise from a general flaw in the American psyche that has been widely expressed at least since the days Tocqueville studied America for his landmark book Democracy in America. Ironically, while America was founded by philosopher kings, philosophy in all things has ever since been eschewed as a conceit of kings. We don't think deeply. All of our knowledge is empirical, none of it deeply reasoned.
Einstein, the inventor of both relativity and quantum physics could not have been born and educated an American; he would have been too shallow. Philosophy strives to get to the roots of things. Philosophy might be useless at establishing what is true. Yet its study inculcates a habit of asking questions, of probing deeply, of getting at underlying assumptions, of rooting out fallacies, and so on. This practice lies at the center of the practice of good government. And because education was originally designed to promote good government, it ought to be at the center of good education.
The practice of philosophy goes by asking questions. And it succeeds by asking good questions, questions that force people to make meaningful distinctions and discard meaningless notions. We imagine that once, long ago, the British school system that gave rise to an empire that spanned the globe was driven by this sort of philosophical inquiry. Even at grade school levels. My own experience was that classroom questioning, direct inquiry, was more prominent in a colonial backwater than it was in America.
Americans, by contrast, have practiced school as vocational training. Exclusively. Now, this is rational behavior for individual students. But the interest of the school is subtly different from the interest of the student. Schools are about building communities. Part of the charter is to make students productive within those communities; but part of the charter is to make those communities cohesive and cooperative so they have a chance of functioning. We need to be more than good, diligent reading machines. We need to think. We need to get along with each other.
The student tends to assume that his only obligation at school is to do well academically. And all of the incentives are rigged for that. For all but a few percent of the brightest students at school, however, the singular purpose of school is to build a durable and cooperative society. In either case it is imperative that students learn to read and write competently. But that is not the end to which education is disposed. It is disposed to the end of giving people the tools by which they exercise good citizenship. Reading, in and of itself, is not enough. Arithmetic, in and of itself is not enough. Otherwise, school would stop at sixth grade.
Schools teach geography, algebra, geometry, history, literature, composition and rhetoric, biology, chemistry, physics, and more because all of these studies develop our capacities for critical thinking in helpful ways. Or they could do so if they were taught in a way that would do this. Sometimes it happens.
In one of my graduate school courses in operations research I had a professor who gave essay examinations without any calculations. It was the only time I had this experience in a life of studying technical things. I am not sure this professor was a very good teacher. Nor over the course of the semester did he engage the class by asking questions to see what people learned, how they thought. But I give him much credit for forcing technical people to express what they knew about the topic at hand in common language. That process of casting understanding gained in one language, a mathematical one, into another language, a common one, forces a person to abstract an idea outside of its expression in a single language. And it is at that point that the idea begins to stop being "words" and start being something else.That is the true practice of philosophy. That is the true goal of education.
So that is my nightmare. It is of a world in which all of our institutions are so dysfunctional that it is as if they were not there at all: education, government, and all the private institutions as well - banking, manufacturing, health care, and so on.
This is not factually the case; not quite, anyway. But it makes for good stuff to worry about. We behave as if these institutions are a given. As if they endure regardless of our actions.
My first reaction to those students in the dream was quite negative because none seemed to realize how broken everything was. And it is impossible for me to completely escape that sense. But there is some hope. The students, in talking to each other were forming communities. And it is from well-formed communities that institutions great and small spring. Talking and listening. All our institutions may fail us; but if we can learn to talk and listen well we have hope of revitalizing failed institutions. Talking and listening is the fundamental cohesive act of all community. It builds society. It is what binds us to each other.
There comes a point in every adult life when what we learn comes from exchanging ideas as peers, not from getting them like commandments on slabs of stone from some high authority. Socrates himself proceeded by talking and listening; by asking good questions, by being part of a vital, thoughtful community. There were no lectures. There was no syllabus, there was no professor, there were no textbooks. Yet the men who inherited from Socrates: Plato and Aristotle, still hold more sway over what we believe and how we think in the west than any philosopher America is likely to produce in all time.Even the founding fathers aped Montesquieu. And Montesquieu followed in Plato and the Latin historians who knew his work.
The model of talking and listening carefully and respectfully, that is how we are to solve our problems. If we are to learn anything from school, that might be the most helpful It's not the subject of any course. Nor is it modelled well by most teaching practices in America.
In the end, we need most to learn how to learn from each other. We need to learn how to spot good and knowledgeable authorities and how to reject the advice of fools, demagogues, pathological narcissists, and sociopaths, opportunists, frauds, gamers, manipulators, and people with destructive hidden agendas. We need to rig societal incentives to reward good and constructive behavior at all levels, not just material ones. We need to learn to listen both openly and critically. And to ask good clarifying questions. We need to question assumptions. We need to get solid evidence. All of these practices will promote trustworthy communication. This will extend any hope we might have of good dialogue filtering up from the lowest levels of society to the highest ones. If we learn the art of good dialogue, we might find hope of transforming this nightmare into a dream.
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved